NATO has bolloxed up the air-strikes so much. Half the time they respond to intel about 8 hours too late. The other half they're hitting the wrong side. They don't seem to have the logistics or rapid response capability of the original USA-UK-France coalition (yes, I know there's US and British elements in NATO, but they're too tangled up in NATO bureaucracy and incompetence).

I believe the best we can hope for now is this conflict ending in a partition of East and West Libya (with Gaddafi still in charge of the West) thanks to the gross incompetence of NATO. France was right in not wanting them to take over the mission.

Barack Obama recently issued an executive order imposing a wave of sanctions against Libya, not only freezing Libyan assets, but barring Americans from having business dealings with Libyan banks.

So raise your hand if you knew that the United States has been extending billions of dollars in aid to Qaddafi and to the Central Bank of Libya, through a Libyan-owned subsidiary bank operating out of Bahrain. And raise your hand if you knew that, just a week or so after Obama&#8217;s executive order, the U.S. Treasury Department quietly issued an order exempting this and other Libyan-owned banks to continue operating without sanction.

I came across the curious case of the Arab Banking Corporation, better known as ABC, while researching a story about the results of the audit of the Federal Reserve. That story, which will be coming out in Rolling Stone in two weeks, will examine in detail some of the many lunacies uncovered by Senate investigators amid the recently-released list of bailout and emergency aid recipients &#8211; a list that includes many extremely shocking names, from foreign industrial competitors to hedge funds in tax-haven nations to various Wall Street figures of note (and some of their relatives). You will want to see this amazing list when it comes out, so please make sure to check the newsstands in two weeks&#8217; time.

This list became public as a result of an amendment added to the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that was sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The amendment forced the Federal Reserve to open its books for the first time and make public the names of those individuals and corporations who received emergency loans and bailout monies during the roughly two year period between the crash of 2008 and the passage of the Dodd-Frank bill.

As Bernie&#8217;s staff was going through this list, it found, among other things, some $26 billion in extremely cheap loans (as low as one quarter of one percent!) extended to this ABC bank over a period of years, beginning in December of 2007 and continuing through as recently as February of 2010. The senator sent a letter to Ben Bernanke over the winter demanding more information about this loan (among others) but the response he got was completely unhelpful.

The Arab League (AL) said on Sunday it would ask the United Nations to consider imposing a no-fly zone over the Gaza Strip to protect the civilians against Israeli air strikes.

In a statement issued after an emergency meeting of the pan- Arab organization at the permanent delegates level in its Cairo headquarter, the AL said it would ask the United Nation Security Council to convene an emergency meeting to discuss the Israeli aggression over Gaza to lift the siege and impose a no-fly zone against the Israeli military to protect civilians.

The statement rejected the double standard policies towards the Palestinian case, urging the UN Security Council and the Quartet committee to bear all responsibilities for halting the subsequent massacres and provide an international protection for the unarmed citizens.

Hrmmm. I love how everyone was cheering on the awesomeness of the Egypt "Revolution". I don't see huge press on their military junta who are throwing bloggers in jail and conducting virginity tests on women. Nevermind the Copts getting killed. It also appears to be rumblings of a counter-revolution already. The military junta is already stating they will clamp down hard on it.

Meanwhile Syria has it shenanigans - you know the 200 people killed and nothing really from Obama. Now Iran is claiming the Syrian uprising is some "Western Plot". Of course, the reason Iran is denouncing the Syrian protests is the Sunni factor, thus why they didn't seem to have much problems with the Libya situation (nor is it a "Western Plot") given the heavy Shi'ite demographics in the rebels.

I notice a trend of how Obama denounces American friendly dictators/leaders (Qaddafi post Iraq and Mubarack) and encourage their overthrowing, and we hear crickets about the attempted overthrowing of anti-American ones. Says barely anything to nothing to Syria and Iran. Remember how he sided with the anti-American Zelaya who tried to be a president for life? Aka the Honduras situation.

Don't get me started on the Ivory coast situation.

If you don't want America sniffing your pants, be as anti-American as possible.

A cold war indeed, I hope it remains cold so far, don't want something to destroy the nuclear power plant in Iran
The Irani twerps were working to gain control over us for near 3 decades, pretty happy they didn't meet success yet, hope they never do
If KSA developed nuclear weapons we will be in a disastrous crossfire, our allies will aid in removing us from the map, not an outcome any side welcomes